Geeky stuff: Optimizing web site operations and performance

To optimize performance of a web site with a complex application structure, several servers and a world wide user base is quite a challenge. Every site is unique in its set-up so learnings from others have limited value. But there is always something to learn.

Attending O'Reilly media's Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Cal Henderson, who is responsible for operations at flickr.com, the extremely popular photo sharing site. From his presentation "Scalable Web Architectures; Common Patterns & Approaches", I took away quite a few good ideas on how we could improve performance both for abb.com as well as our intranet. Improving performance is not only a question of server set-up, tuning and distribution, but also how the application itself stores and accesses data.

If his 145 slides are not enough, I'd recommend his book "Building Scalable Web Sites". Still want to know more? If so, you should enlist for O'Reilly media's planned Velocity conference in San Fransisco June 23-24 next year, which they claim is a first of its kind. In addition to Cal Henderson, Amazon.com and other global web sites will be presenting.

UPDATE: Cal Henderson is in fact lead developer on Flickr, not responsible for operations.

Amazon launches new e-reader named after ABB CEO?

I don't normally cover new technical gadgets here on this blog, but I simply have to make an exception as Amazon have launched their new e-reader named "Kindle". Asked whether it is named after our CEO Fred Kindle, ABB press spokeman Wolfram Eberhardt says: "We never comment on market rumours..."

Join the ABB network on facebook

The ABB network on Facebook is now up and running. Last time I checked it was not set up yet, but this morning it already had 264 members - myself included. Not a whole lot! Siemens has 5044, so there is some catching up to do...

A wiki about wikis and all things Enterprise 2.0

My colleague Piera sent me a link to an interesting wiki - a collection of case studies from different companies outlining their experiences in implementing web 2.0 technology in their enterprises. "What a cool idea", she said, and I agree.

Andrew McAfee, who is associate professor at Harvard Business School, explains in his blog the background for the initiative :

"In my morning keynote at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference I proposed the creation of a repository of enterprise 2.0 case studies that would itself adhere to E2.0 best practices -- it would be freely editable and extensible, and have an emergent rather than an imposed structure. I heard expressions of interest in the idea throughout the rest of the day, and when I sat down to dinner with my friends from the enterprise wiki company Socialtext they volunteered their software and told me they'd already grabbed a great domain name -- cases2.com (disclosure: Socialtext lets me use their software for free, but I have no financial interest in the company and have done no paid work for it.)."

"So now we need to populate this site with all things enterprise 2.0, and we need some help getting started. Cases2.com will be publicly available soon, but it's not yet. When we open it up, we'd like to have some compelling initial content. We need a first set of case studies that will perform the same functions as the first few dollar bills in a tip jar: encouraging others to contribute, and showing them how."

This was some months ago, in the mean time some interesting cases have been added and the wiki opened to the public. Here is a link to the wiki: http://www.cases2.com/

ABB improves score in H&H web ranking

Financial Times covered the Hallvarsson & Halvarsson (H&H) web ranking this week, surveying the top 158 European companies. While ABB was not mentioned in the FT article, the background material shows that our score has improved to 69,25 (out of 100), against a score of 63,5 for 2006. As a result of this www.abb.com now ranks as 23 on the list of top European companies, against rank 42 in 2006.

The H&H web ranking primarily focuses on the needs of investors, using a check list approach. The ranking was previously given significant prominence by FT and major European newspapers, but has received less attention the last couple of years. It could be related to the fact that many of the top companies in their ranking are customers of the same web agency that do the ranking...

H&H has previously published a ranking for Swedish web sites, were ABB's site improved its ranking from 42 last year to 13 in 2007 as a result of the improved score.

I expect H&H to publish a similar ranking for Switzerland later this year. Based on the results of the European ranking it appears that we will not improve our 2006 rank as number 5, as other Swiss companies have improved their score as well.

US intelligence community starts social networking

In December, the U.S. intelligence community is launching a social-networking site just for spooks.

The classified "A-Space" ultimately will grow to include blogs, searchable databases, libraries of reports, collaborative word processing and other tools to help analysts quickly trade, update and edit information, Associated Press reports on Yahoo News.

The social networking site comes on the heels of the year-old Intellipedia, a Web site modeled after the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Intellipedia already has nearly 30,000 posted articles and 4,800 edits added every workday.

"Organizers acknowledge it may be difficult to erase generations of territorial tendencies and prevent spats among the country's 16 intelligence agencies, which often want credit for their own discoveries", the articles states. Something like that would never be a problem in ABB, would it?

Netvibes goes mobile

Those of you who have followed my recommendation to use Netvibes as your web aggregator, can now access the site on your mobile at http://m.netvibes.com/

I've tried it out on my smartphone HTC-S710 and it seems to work perfectly. It list all your widgets, column by column, and you can follow the links to summaries and original sources. It would have been nice if you could choose to see only unread items, but alas, it shows you all. When I get around to it I'll probably rearrange my page a bit to make it more useful on a mobile, perhaps setting up a separate tab for mobile browsing.

The mobile version does not allow you to handle preferences and settings, and if you do not already have an account, you need to connect through your laptop to get one.

If any of my readers have an iPhone, they can access a special iPhone version at http://iphone.netvibes.com/

Is someone trying to register "your" domain?

This phenomenon keeps recurring from time to time: You receive an e-mail or a fax from a company warning that some domain names you may be interested in - like www."abbproduct".com - have been submitted for registration by some unidentified third party. The solicitation offers to block the application by obtaining the domain name on ABB's behalf - for a fee.

This a well-known web scam. Anyone familiar with the registration process of new domain names know the process is almost instantaneous, and leaves no room for this kind of procedure. So you can safely let the request go in the circular file - or inform the police.

No cyber-squatting please!

I recently received a polite e-mail from a Swiss competitor's legal council: they had discovered that someone had registered "their" Chinese web domain "www.competitor.cn" and had it redirected to ABB China's homepage at http://www.abb.com.cn/. Our competitor is also active in the Chinese market and have their own Chinese homepage at "www.cn.competitor.com/".

Despite all the Swiss politeness it was not difficult to read between the lines how upset they were. And so was I.

Needless to say, this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. Not only is it unethical and in breach of ABB's code of conduct, in some jurisdictions ABB may even be held financially responsible for any loss of business for the competitor.

We have our self been a victim of this technique some years ago. Someone had registered one of ABB's trade marks as domain name and had it redirected to the Siemens site. In that case we received all possible help from Siemens when we contacted them and the issue was quickly resolved.

Also the Chinese domain issue was quickly resolved in cooperation with our competitor and the local ABB organization. The culprit was not identified, but the address no longer redirects to our site.

Webatabb blocked by China's "great firewall"

We have received reports that this blog is now unavailable in China, due to the "great firewall", aimed at protecting Chinese users against the evils of the Internet. We find the reports credible.

Financial Times' Tech blog reported the same some time ago, and asked if it was possibly something they had said. It turned out the answer was no; All blogs on the major blog hosting domains are routinely and indiscriminately blocked, which is probably the reason why this blog is blocked as well.

So it's nothing personal, and we do not expect visits anytime soon from the "Beijing Internet police" who, according to Yahoo Tech news, will start appearing every 30 minutes on some major Chinese web sites as of this Saturday.

"It is our duty to wipe out information that does public harm and disrupts social order," the Beijing's public security bureau's deputy chief of Internet surveillance, Zhao Hongzhi, is quoted as saying to China daily.